fattoush fetish

Sometimes I have such a good time that I actually get jealous of myself.

I might taste something delicious and think 'that is so wonderful, I would LOVE to have that every day until I get sick of it'.  Then I realise that I made it, and that there is no restriction on when or what I eat and that, in short, my heart's desire was just granted.

Can anyone else be as lucky as that?

After a sustained but unsuccessful campaign on the national supermarkets I finally found the spices sumac and za'atar in the restaurant Comptoir Libanais which, it transpires, also sells Middle Eastern ingredients.  I had been impatient to make Fattoush, a fresh, zingy salad, which looked as if it could be different enough to feel like I wasn't eating yet more tomatoes and cucumber.

To sustain me while I prepared the salad, I ate Mallorcan sobrasada on oat cakes, with a spot of Oloroso sherry, standing on one leg, leaning over the sink.  As is my glamorous wont.

In a model of time-efficiency (I'm so jealous!) I put soda bread in the oven, along with some chicken thighs rubbed with oil and za'atar: whilst they cooked, I took a well-earned shower.  As my friend Anun said, so delicately, of hot weather and body odour "by noon, I am AWARE of myself".

Emerging like a bespectacled Venus from the waves, I found the bread baked to perfection - no room for modesty today - and the chicken thighs begging for a basting.  I appeased them, saucy wretches, and cracked on with the salad.

I started out following a recipe - of COURSE Nigella, of COURSE 'Forever Summer' - however I sort of lost myself in the salad drawer of my fridge and this is what I actually put together:

• 2 plump tomatoes, diced
• 1/3 cucumber, diced
• about 6 skinny spring onions, chopped big and rough
• a handful of radishes in quarters
• a very few baby gem leaves, torn. Almost tempted to say don't use these.
• 1 clove of garlic, minced
• 3/4 teaspoon sumac
• pinch salt
• a little glug of virgin olive oil
• juice of half a lime
• mint leaves, shredded

With the first mouthful I unravelled and nearly had to telephone someone - anyone - to tell them about it.  It is the taste equivalent of dazzling.  It is 'fresh' cubed.  It also leaves you with terrible garlic / onion breath.

I gathered myself together, put a roast chicken thigh* and quarter of soda bread onto the plate of fattoush, and ate fast.

*Something for the more sleazy eater: the chicken leaves a lot of za'atar-spiced oil/fat in the roasting dish which you might like to mop up with your soda bread. Do consider it...